Flap, flap, flap, flap – glide. There’s a moment reading Bowland Beth when suddenly you’re airborne, flying above dark moorland, fixing a bird’s eye on the human-dominated world below. That’s exactly David Cobham’s intention – because his new book goes inside the mind of one hen harrier, the much-persecuted bird of prey teetering on the brink of extinction in England.
Thanks to nest cameras, a satellite tag and eyewitness accounts from birdwatchers and scientists who monitored an individual bird called Bowland Beth, Cobham has created an unusually sharp dramatisation of her life – and her death in 2012, after being shot. While there’s plenty of gripping incident, Cobham has rooted it all in fact, checking with zoologists if birds grieve (yes, some do) and avoiding anthropomorphic flights of fancy. “I’ve kept my feet on the ground,” he says with a smile.
Cobham has form when it comes to seeing the world through the eyes of another species. He directed Tarka the Otter, the classic film based on Henry Williamson’s book. Released in 1979, this tale of Tarka being chased to his death by otterhounds raised popular awareness about the plight of the creature, which had been all but exterminated from southern Britain. Otter-hunting was outlawed just as the film was finished and numbers have now bounced back.
Cobham hopes his new book will have a similar impact. “I wanted to dramatise Bowland Beth’s life to get at a different audience: not the pure birder but someone who had not thought of hen harriers before – or the pain a hen harrier must go through when it is shot but not killed cleanly.”
Stephen Murphy, a scientist with the government’s conservation watchdog Natural England, inspired Cobham to write the book. Murphy has studied hen harriers for years and acutely understands the challenge of conserving a bird that preys on grouse chicks. Because grouse-shooting is big business – people pay up to £4,000 a day to shoot large numbers – gamekeepers are under huge pressure to control predators, illegally if necessary.
With a nod to Coronation Street’s Bet Lynch, schoolchildren in the Forest of Bowland named her Bowland Betty, but Murphy and Cobham always called her Beth. In 2012, Cobham just missed seeing her there in Lancashire – she sped away 30 minutes before he arrived – but he was able to follow her progress via Murphy’s satellite data. “She was Super Hen Harrier. Even when Steve was putting the tag on her as a juvenile bird, he could tell she was brighter eyed, with bigger talons and shinier plumage.” She became known for her remarkable trips – dashing from Lancashire to the Scottish Borders, then on to Inverness and back again in the space of a few days. Beth also – fatally – frequented an area of North Yorkshire that Cobham calls “bandit country” because of its suspicious paucity of raptors.
While English grouse moor owners deny they are the cause of the hen harrier’s struggles, ecologists calculate that the country’s uplands should support more than 300 pairs. Last year, just there were just four. Scotland has 460.
As a film-maker and naturalist, Cobham has had a full and fascinating career. He was born into birds: his family reputedly brought the turkey to England in the 16th century and his great-great-great-grandfather was one of the last people to shoot a great bustard. (“Not something I’m very proud of.”) When Cobham went to Stowe school in Buckinghamshire, he kept a tawny owl and peregrine falcon in his room. He was also allowed to own a gun and shoot rabbits. “If you didn’t want to do the junior corps thing, playing soldiers, you could go and fly a goshawk. It did me a lot of good.”
Cobham made what he believes to be the BBC’s first conservation film, Vanishing Hedgerows, about the destructive farming of the 1960s and 70s. Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the Otter, was its presenter. He told Cobham he had been offered, and had turned down, a derisory £300 from Walt Disney for the Tarka film rights. Williamson asked Cobham if he would adapt the book instead. “Henry said, ‘You’ve got to do it as the sun sees things – without shadows.’” Cobham followed his instructions, devoting 18 months to a beautiful, yet brutally realistic, film.
The key was his leading man: Tarka. A baby otter called Spade was procured from the Otter Trust. They could film for only two hours at a stretch before Spade would curl up asleep in someone’s lap, but the creature was a biddable star. “It was amazing what it would do,” remembers Cobham. He had allowed two days to film a sequence in which Tarka hides from the hounds in a waterwheel – but Spade nailed it in two hours.
After the success of Tarka, Cobham was contacted by a teacher who’d heard the film-maker had some baby barn owls left over after filming. He requested a couple for a bird-obsessed pupil. Cobham duly obliged and the teenager, one Chris Packham, was delighted. Cobham still knows Packham, who would go on to present Springwatch on the BBC.
Cobham, who was born in Yorkshire in 1930, has worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Peter Ustinov (“He wasn’t very pleasant,” says Cobham, who is generally gentlemanly to a fault about even his harshest critics). He met his wife, Liza Goddard, when she played a journalist in his adaptation of Brendon Chase, a rollicking tale of runaway kids turning feral.
The never-work-with-children-or-animals adage certainly applied to Brendon Chase. One child had his appendix out a week before filming and couldn’t run. Cobham was more confident about casting a bear after travelling to Coventry zoo to meet one. “The door opened and this bear walked in and sat down on the chair opposite me. When its keeper came in, he lined a pipe with tobacco and the bear sat there smoking it. I knew the bear was going to be OK.”
On the final day of filming, however, the bear escaped into the New Forest. Minutes later, Cobham was approached by two children from an orienteering group. Panic-stricken, he drove about in a minibus rounding up the young orienteers. Some time later, the bear was found – asleep in a dried-up stream.
Cobham has now retired from film-making, lives in Norfolk, and concentrates on writing. His next book will be a history of falconry, interspersed with his own memories of training a goshawk just after he had graduated.
We live in a golden age of natural history documentaries, but no one makes natural history dramas like Cobham did. Why? “Because it’s jolly hard work,” he laughs. “And perhaps people don’t like live animals being used in films.” What about a film version of Bowland Beth? “I wouldn’t do it,” smiles Cobham, “but somebody could have a go.”
• Bowland Beth by David Cobham is published by William Collins, priced £16.99. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £14.44.
